


I will find the right words (and they will be simple)

by SquaresAreNotCircles



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Episode: s07e08 Hana Komo Pae (Rite of Passage), Father-Daughter Relationship, Fluff, Love Confessions, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-05
Updated: 2018-12-05
Packaged: 2019-09-12 03:11:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,254
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16865047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SquaresAreNotCircles/pseuds/SquaresAreNotCircles
Summary: “Steve is not my boyfriend,” he says, his voice impressively even, he thinks.There Grace’s eyebrows go again. He’s not even looking at her, but he catches it in the corner of his eyes, and he can feel it with his sixth sense developed during fatherhood. “Then how did you know I was talking about him?”“Well, I mean,” he starts, with no idea how to go on, because she’s got a point there, maybe, in some ways.In which Grace has something to say about her dad telling Steve to pick a base.





	I will find the right words (and they will be simple)

**Author's Note:**

> This is a coda fic for 7.08 (Hana Komo Pae/Right of Passage), where everyone at Grace’s Winter Formal dance gets taken hostage. Steve bursts in to save them, hugs Grace, and then turns to Danny, going, “What, nothing, nothing? No hug?” and Danny replies, infamously, “I’m so happy to see you right now, I’ll give you a hug, I’ll give you a kiss, pick a base.”
> 
> Also in this episode, Danny finds out who Grace’s boyfriend is, and I kind of wanted to do something with that, too? So here it is, two for the price of one, yay. I also just generally feel like writing fic related to this episode is kind of a rite of passage (haaa, see what I did there?) for fic writers for this ship, so it had to happen at one point.
> 
> The title is a Jack Kerouac quote, because I enjoy sounding pretentious without actually having to put a lot of work into naming things.

“You know, you’re a bit of a hypocrite.”

Danny pulls to a stop at the red light and looks over at Grace. Her tone is mild and she’s almost smiling. She is looking out of the passenger window for once, instead of at her phone. The streetlights illuminate her profile and her artfully wavy hair, and Danny has to marvel at how there is no outward trace on her hinting at what happened today. 

“Excuse me? How do you figure that?” he asks, because she probably wouldn’t appreciate his sappy thoughts about how proud he is of this unbelievably brave girl he raised.

Grace turns her head to face him, and now he can see there’s a definite accusation in her eyes. “You have this big freak-out over me having a boyfriend and not telling you, but you never told me about your boyfriend either.”

“My-” His brain screeches to a halt and he has to try again. “Sorry, I don’t think I heard that right. My _what_ now?”

“Danno, the light.”

“The what?” he asks, because really, this day, it’s too much. His daughter has a boyfriend, a ballroom full of kids gets taken hostage by some crazy guys with guns, Steve takes credit for Danny’s sandwiches and now Danny’s brain is broken, evidently.

Grace raises her eyebrows at him to the tune of someone behind them honking impatiently. “The light,” she repeats. “It’s green.” 

He tears his eyes away from his daughter, with her pretty face and scarily grown-up manners sometimes, and looks up at the light to find that yes, it’s changed color in the time Danny spent not understanding the world. He gets the car rolling again just as the green turns back to red, but he ignores it. He feels wired, like they’re still inside that ballroom with guns far too close to his not-so-little girl, and he can’t sit still any longer.

Grace is quiet. She seems to be waiting him out, and he wonders when the hell she picked up a cop’s interrogation tactics. That’s one thing Rachel can rightfully blame him for, at least.

He breathes in and out, preparing himself for what he’s pretty sure is about to come. Cutting this off before it can get anywhere seems like his best option. “Steve is not my boyfriend,” he says, his voice impressively even, he thinks.

There Grace’s eyebrows go again. He’s not even looking at her, but he catches it in the corner of his eyes, and he can feel it with his sixth sense developed during fatherhood. “Then how did you know I was talking about him?”

“Well, I mean,” he starts, with no idea how to go on, because she’s got a point there, maybe, in some ways. “Who else would you be talking about? Lou’s married.” It’s a pretty weak joke, but mostly because he still feels a little weak himself.

“You also didn’t tell Lou that he could kiss you or pick a base in front of my whole damn year.”

“Language,” he scolds, on reflex. He’d rather join her and let out some colorful words of his own.

“Sorry.” It sounds more like ‘we really don’t have time for this right now’ than like an apology, but he’ll let it slide, just this once. Even if he hadn’t planned to let her off easy, the note of hurt that creeps into Grace’s voice as she goes on would have distracted him sufficiently. “But seriously, Danno, why didn’t you tell me? I know that Charlie is still really small, but I’m fifteen. You didn’t think I would have a problem with it, did you?”

He can be perfectly honest about that. “No, that thought never even crossed my mind.”

“My friend Keala asked me how long you had been together, and I had to tell her I didn’t know. It was awkward.”

“Oh,” he says, and he can’t stop himself from barking a laugh, “that was awkward for you? Well, I’m so sorry my lack of a relationship with Steve put you through that.”

“Lack?” Grace repeats. She sounds unsure for the first time since she started this by accusing him of being a hypocrite, and he’s very tired, suddenly. He never wants to hurt her or make her feel stupid, and it seems that his own stupidity has led to that, now.

“Yes. Like I said, he’s not my boyfriend.”

“Then why ask him to kiss you?”

“That was a joke,” he says, but the words taste bitter on his tongue, like a really bad lie. Lying is another thing he doesn’t want to do to his girl, not when he can help it – and he can, right now, even though it would be easier to just let it be. He sighs, flexes his fingers on the wheel and keeps his eyes firmly on the road. “Okay. It wasn’t a lie. I might have meant it, a little bit, but that doesn’t mean that there’s anything more going on, alright? Let’s just leave it at that, please.”

He can feel Grace staring at him, so he chances a quick glance at her. She’s frowning. “I take back what I said.”

“Which part?”

“The hypocrite part.”

That’s unexpected, but good. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, etcetera, especially not if it comes from your teenage daughter. “Thank you,” he says.

It seems like Grace was waiting for that. Her punchline is very deliberate, and Danny has to admit it works very well. “You’re not a hypocrite, you’re an idiot,” she tells him, which means it’s time for him to yell a bit again, whether he wants to or not.

“Grace! I didn’t raise you this way.”

“Yes, you did.” 

She is stubborn and sure of herself, and the worst part of it is that he can’t even argue with her, because she’s probably right. She grew up spending far too many weekend afternoons in his company while Steve was somewhere in the general vicinity, and this is exactly the kind of thing he would have told Steve.

“Okay,” he concedes, “but your mother didn’t raise you this way.”

“You should call Steve.”

He briefly wonders if this is really happening – is his beautiful, innocent daughter actually giving him relationship advice right now? – but then he decides that he doesn’t want to dwell on that. At all. “Why?” he asks instead. “What am I going to tell him? ‘Hi buddy, sorry I woke you up, but my teenage daughter was mean to me and then bullied me into calling you way past midnight?’”

“If that’s what it takes, then yes.”

“That’s ridiculous, monkey.”

Breaking out the kid pet names doesn’t soften her up the way he had hoped. “If you don’t call him, I will.”

He turns the car into his driveway, and he must be distracted, or Steve’s crazy rubbed off on him after all these years, or he hit his head at some point while crawling through a ventilation shaft this evening. Whatever the reason, what he says next is, “Alright, fine.”

Grace seems just as surprised as he is. She unfastens her seatbelt so she can fully turn to him in her seat. “Fine?” she questions.

“Yes. Fine, you wore me down, I’ll do it.”

“That was a lot easier than expected.”

He scrubs a hand over his face and allows himself to revel in the darkness behind his closed eyes, for just a moment. His heart is beating at a ridiculous speed, not getting the memo that he’s just sitting in his own car and talking to his daughter. “Yeah, well, you may have a point, I suppose. You’re a smart girl, Grace.” He turns his head and grins at her. In the half-shadow of the porchlight shining through the windshield, her eyes look huge. God, he loves her so much. “You must get that from your father. I love you.”

She smiles back and leans over to kiss his cheek. “Love you too, Danno.” She opens her car door, but then turns around again to point a warning finger at him in a way that reminds him eerily of her mother. “I’m going inside now, but don’t you dare follow me until you’ve talked to uncle Steve. I’ll find out if you don’t do it.”

“How?”

“I’m not telling you,” she says cheerily, and skips out of the car before he can protest further. He watches her go up to the front door and use her own key to let herself into the house. Only after the door has swung shut behind her and he’s seen lights turn on behind various windows, does he finally fish his phone from his pants pocket.

He activates the screen, which tells him that it’s 1:34 at night. The numbers are superimposed over a picture of Grace and Charlie at Kamekona’s, taken by Steve, who sent it to him with a silly string of happy emoji’s as the caption. He stares at it until the screen goes dark again.

He reactivates it, unlocks the phone and takes a deep breath before he hits call on the contact labeled _Steve McGarrett_. Despite the late hour, Steve picks up almost immediately, like he was waiting with his phone in his hand.

“Danny, everything alright? Is Grace okay?”

“Yeah.” His throat constricts at the image he gets of Steve, already half out of his chair and ready to jump into his truck if asked. He would break every speed limit known to man to get to wherever Danny and Grace were if Danny gave any indication whatsoever that they might need him there. Danny has to swallow hard before he can continue. “Yes. Don’t worry your pretty head, everything’s fine.”

“Okay,” Steve says, calmed down immediately, but a little curious now. He has to be wondering why Danny called. 

Danny is wondering that himself, actually. It sounded like a good idea when Grace said it, but he has no actual plan. When the silence on his end lasts a little too long, Steve speaks up again, soft in that unexpected way that he has.

“How are you doing, buddy? After tonight?”

“I’m okay, babe, really,” Danny says. “I told you not to worry. Or hey, you know what you should be worried about? Lou told me you took credit for my sandwiches. You’re a glory hog. Didn’t I explicitly tell you not to do that, huh?”

He can hear the smile in Steve’s voice when he replies, and it makes it a little easier for Danny to breathe. “Yeah, well. You like to remind me daily that I don’t always do what you say, Danno.”

“No, you really don’t.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing,” he lies. He drops his forehead against the steering wheel and closes his eyes. “No, wait, that’s bullshit. I promised Grace I was done with the bullshit.”

“Grace?”

“Yeah. I didn’t use those exact words, of course, but- We had a talk in the car, on the way home.” This is it, probably. Now or never. “She thinks you picked the wrong base.” 

There. He’s still a bit of a chicken with the way he said it, but the ball is in Steve’s court now.

Steve is quiet for a long moment. It’s probably nothing, in normal earth time, but in Danny’s mind the silence stretches on for so long that by the time Steve finally answers, Danny is considering ways to distance himself as far as possible from his own words, or maybe simply from Steve and Hawaii and the shame he will have to carry around forever. The next flight out to Jersey should be in a few hours.

“She does, huh?” Steve asks, oddly sedate. He’s not taking this as a joke, which Danny had half hoped he would (but also half really, really didn’t want him to, so he can’t be too disappointed). “Is she the only one?”

“Hell, what do I know about what all those other kids thought? I’m not a mind reader.”

There’s a slight huff, and he can paint Steve’s face so perfectly in his mind that it’s like he could reach out and touch him right now. Maybe kiss him. “Neither am I, Danny. Let me rephrase that: is she the only Williams that thinks so?”

“No,” Danny admits, taking his time with it. “No, she is not.”

“Okay,” Steve says, and without warning, there is the sound of a door slamming shut on the other end of the line. It kicks Danny’s heart into overdrive.

“Okay?”

“I’m coming over.”

“You are?”

“We can’t disappoint Grace,” Steve says, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. To Danny it is, always, but it’s still a trip to hear it from Steve. “I love her like she’s my own kid, Danny.”

“I know. I know you do.” 

“Traffic’s not very heavy this time of night. I’ll be there in ten.”

Danny doesn’t bother pointing out that it’s impossible to get from Steve’s house to his in ten minutes, even with no traffic and only green lights. Not without intending to break the speed limit in a way that should get Steve’s license revoked, if he even has one at all currently. “Good,” is all he says. “I’ll see you in ten.”

I love you, he wants to add, but doesn’t, because it’s not the time. Steve will be standing on his doorstep in nine minutes.

He’ll tell him then, right after Steve finally picks the right base.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!! Comments are a writer's lifeblood and I'll love you for them. ❤️
> 
> I'm on Tumblr as [itwoodbeprefect](https://itwoodbeprefect.tumblr.com), or with my exclusively H50 sideblog as [five-wow](https://five-wow.tumblr.com).


End file.
